Ephemera from 3 ArtBook/Zine Fairs 2023 (Pt.1 @ Miss Read)

Miss Read 2023 bag distributed to all vendors

This year (2023) saw Likink partcipate in Miss Read, Berlin, the Vienna Art Book Fair as well as attending the Rotterdam Zine Camp as a viewer/consumer. All three are yearly events that are accessible to the small time as well as the super ambitious, publishers of multiple hard-cover titles as well as the one-off desktop printed pamphlet. Of course, as long as you have the cash to get there. In the first place . . .

For a two-person DIY endeavor like Likink (and its partner Labkink) a book fair like Miss Read, which consisted of three long days and an unrelenting audience, can be exhausting and was thus managed with all the wherewithal of DIY, as we came and went as we pleased (within reasonable parameters).

But distribution is the over-riding concern, as art maintains while yet requiring marketplace maintenance, or otherwise, it goes nowhere. This requires one of the most boring jobs (that nevertheless employs unnumbered citizens): retail. Not only does the “salesperson” have to collect the cash/make the change/bag the purchase but is sometimes called upon to make a “pitch”.

With art book/zine fairs (and perhaps second-hand vinyl record fairs) there can be an easing of the seller dynamic, as we, the participants, also check-it-out and end up with our fair share of material, let alone getting to know whoever is situated to our left and right. Because what eases the boredom of retail? Conversation . . . no boss to tell me to “get back to work”.

In a careerist mode this might be called : networking. We do share information/contacts and if unwilling to commit to a purchase, we grab whatever is free: business cards, brochures, ephemera. This is what you will find below, for your careerist edification or simple curiosity. Click on images for larger view/better detail.

This appeared on our table one morning during Miss Read. Someone who, quite appropriately, attempts to hack the event while pitching their cause.

On our left at Miss Read sat the ultimate experimental non-commercial Berlin-based “Organza Ray” who sold (of all things…at a book fair) the so-called obsolete cassette format containing spoken word and sound as well as one-off books of collages. You can check their bandcamp site linked to their name (above). Elani and Hilary provided an excellent introduction to the artistic ambiance of Berlin as well as being comarades-in-arms.

To our right sat “Bueys on Sale”, a Berlin-based silk-screen studio who produces their own work as well as the work of a wide variety of international artists, all of it decidedly psychedelic. For example, I was thumbing through one pamphlet and he said, “I did that on LSD”, and I was like “All of it looks like that.” He confessed that working like that was a matter of micro-dosing rather than taking a full-on trip.

Miss Read made an effort to assemble an international cast, this year focusing on Asia, as with our friends at Hong Kong’s Zine Coop.

If  “distribution is key” I don’t know where else I would have come across Iwalewa Books.

Promotional material included standard size business cards, postcards, and . . . bookmarks.

Coming Up: material from Vienna Art Book Fair 2023